I have been closely following the research around optimistic and zk-rollups since 2017, and met several initial core contributors of Optimism as it was starting out. The application ecosystem on Ethereum was raw and practically unusable then, but we’ve seen the beginnings of broad societal reach now.

It is evident that scaling Ethereum with a community-aligned effort is critical today. Optimism is widely accepted as the most EVM equivalent optimistic rollup and any decisions made (eg. retroactive distributions, grants, protocol changes, decentralization of sequencer) need careful consideration from delegates who care deeply about their short and long term tradeoffs.

I co-founded Spectral, which creates a score for users based on historical user activity (specifically with lending and trading protocols currently). Our goal is to encourage users to care about their actions on-chain and be good actors, while allowing protocols to be more capital efficient and user-sensitive. I’ve also helped build, incubate and made critical protocol decisions with several projects in the space that include: a widely used AMM, a decentralized basis trading protocol and a payments management tool for projects. Not too long ago, I was working towards a PhD in computer science focused on applications of zk-proofs before deciding to build in web3 full-time.

In order to onboard every person on Earth eventually, we will need scaling solutions to be governed thoughtfully with a long term future in mind. I believe active governance over Optimism will lead to a community that fosters values which promote public goods with strong incentive alignment for contributors. I want to be part of this active governance and deliver value to the Optimism and Ethereum ecosystems simultaneously.

My view on the Optimistic Vision 3:

Growing up seeing Wikipedia ask for donations every few months in order to keep operating was jarring given the impact Wikipedia has had on the world. On the other hand, we’ve seen time and time again, with platforms like facebook, that the mandate of generating profit for shareholders skews incentives in a way where users and platform contributors are no longer the main beneficiaries. In the long run, the societal impact of primarily profit-seeking platforms has been largely negative.

In the face of all this, Ethereum has been an incredible demonstration of the premise that Impact = Profit. While it was not clear initially that ETH would accrue value, by attracting millions of developers and users who built open-sourced applications and tools considered public goods, the holders of ETH greatly benefited from a community formed around shared beliefs.

The Optimism ecosystem is in a particularly challenging position, where given the EVM-equivalence, most public goods built for/on Ethereum can benefit Optimism and vice-versa. As a scaling solution to Ethereum, it is important to balance value accrual towards OP and ETH so that the ecosystems are symbiotic in the long run.

“The Optimism Collective will dispel the myth that public goods cannot be profitable”. This is a statement I am fundamentally aligned with. Optimism has the opportunity to carefully craft incentive structures around distributing OP and rewarding public goods given a large percentage of these incentives across User Airdrops, RetroPGF and Ecosystem Fund have not been distributed yet.

My view on the first three articles of the [Working Constitution]:

Working constitution: A commitment to experimentation - Creativity and experimentation seem to have stalled a bit in the space, especially in regard to economic incentives for contributors. The deluge of liquidity mining incentives and retroactive airdrops have led to very predictable project trajectories that often don’t accomplish the goals of the project. I would like to see experiments and improvements on Quadratic voting, soulbound NFTs and using cryptographic tools to enhance private voting. I would also want to see more tools being built around self-sovereign identity as public goods, leveraging a lot of the recent work from the zero-knowledge community.

OP Citizens and OP Holders will equally coexist within the Collective: Will have to see how things play out. Every project has large idealistic goals and dreams but often times economic incentives overrule everything else. Both houses need to be designed with this in mind, to allow for sustainable growth.

The Optimism Foundation will be a steward of the Optimism Collective and its early governance model: A normal starting point. With progressive decentralization of all aspects of the Optimism ecosystem, it remains to be seen how Foundations can remain at once hands-off (in allowing creativity and freedom while not picking “winners”) and nurturing (in providing specific support) to contributors.

Skills: Identifying societal/technological trends and building projects with collaborators.

Expertise: Doing research in math/computer science. Thinking through economic incentives and ideating on web3 project initiatives.

My favorite Web3 projects: iden3 + tools (circom), Gnosis Safe, zkEVM (from the EF+contributors @ Scroll)